New Criterion

A magazine that publishes articles, notes and comment on cultural life in America. Publishes contributions from poets, authors, public policy scholars, humanities lecturers, and critics. Includes poetry, arts criticism, and commentary. Departments in thea

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Articles from Vol. 20, No. 5, January

Concert Note

Ivan Moravec, at Carnegie Hall, New York. The Czech pianist Ivan Moravec gave the final concert of his U.S. tour at Carnegie Hall on November 27th with a program of works by Janacek (Sonata I.X. 1905), Debussy (the second of the Estampes, "La Soiree...

Laurence Sterne's masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, is seldom read any more outside of graduate seminars. This is a sad fate for the author whom Nietszche deemed "the most liberated spirit of all time," and whose style, in its day, was considered "the...

More than thirty years ago, when I was a graduate student, a college classmate and her husband took me to meet a friend of theirs. I remember almost nothing about the evening except entering the apartment and being stunned by the sight of two walls...

We know it seems churlish to say "Good riddance!" when someone bids farewell. Just as obituary is a genre that favors eulogy--de mortuis nil nisi bonum--so valedictions tend to elicit polite good wishes. There are exceptions to every rule, however,...

In a letter to Robert Lowell of November 29, 1967, Dwight Macdonald wrote, "Oscar was almost always right (except in his erotic tastes and habits) about all the big issues of his time--social, moral, aesthetic." During the past century, Oscar Wilde...

The Cultural War on Western Civilization. (the Survival of Culture: V)

In the last week of September, shortly after the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, made an extraordinary statement. During a visit to Germany, he declared Western civilization...

"Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus," says the bestselling pop psychologist John Gray, and no one thinks twice about it. For the high-brow set, the bestselling pop linguist Deborah Tannen writes book after book to explain how men and women use...